3of3Al Pacino was hardly in his heyday in “Scent of a Wom
an,” with Gabrielle Anwar.Photo: The Chronicle

Dear Brilliant Writer Mick LaSalle: In your article about sex in the movies, you wrote that even “until the 1920s, reputable doctors actually believed that a man’s strength was contained in his semen.” The crazy idea lasted way longer than that, Mick. When I was in high school, coaches were adamant about telling their male athletes to stay away from their girlfriends before the “big game.”

Anthony Barcellos, Davis

Dear Brilliant Writer Anthony Barcellos: Very true. As a young man, I too felt that participation in high school athletics was vastly overrated.

Hello Mick: I was wondering if you could address this new trend of having to pick your seat when paying for the ticket. This is not how movie theaters should be populated. It needs to be an organic affair. You pay your ticket, go in, scan the surroundings, and pick your seat.

Ed Williams, Palo Alto

Hello Ed: Actually, I like this new way of doing things, because if you have an assigned seat, you don’t have to get to the theater early and sit through 40 minutes of horrible, horrible advertisements. I don’t mind the movie trailers, but when they advertise TV shows, I start feeling like a rhesus monkey in an experiment to see how much pop culture I can take without throwing up. I start feeling like it’s “Brave New World” and these entertainment companies are pushing soma on everybody. Anyway, it’s only in recent years that the moviegoing experience has been virtually identical at all venues. There used to be luxury houses selling tickets for $2 when the average ticket price was 10 cents. A little diversification of the marketplace isn’t bad. People love their living rooms and want to replicate the experience of sitting in them, whether in a movie theater or on an airplane.

Hello Nicholas: I suppose it’s a great movie. It’s remarkable to look at, and it’s several cuts above the prestige American musicals of the time. But it could never be a favorite of mine because there’s something about it that I find objectionable, almost offensive. The movie makes a comparison between the plight of a brilliant ballerina and the Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl who puts on a pair of red shoes and can’t stop dancing. Dancing kills her. But dancing doesn’t kill the woman in “The Red Shoes.” Not being able to practice her art kills her. Getting torn between two idiot men who regard her as a possession kills her. The fairy-tale analogy absolves the men of all responsibility and implies that any woman of ambition is bound to end up either dead or miserable. The movie offers her pity for her ambition, when the real pity is that she never gets the chance to express her genius.

Now, if the movie were in any way a commentary on this — an observation of this as an unfortunate state of affairs — it would be another matter. But it’s as if the filmmakers themselves are locked into the same narrow view. Or maybe they were simply locked into the analogy and saw no way of getting out of it except by straight-facing it. In either case, they got away with it. It has been 67 years, and people still love that movie.

Dear Mick LaSalle: So Al Pacino’s heyday was only in his 30s? What about “Scent of a Woman,” for which he won an Oscar, made when he was middle-aged? Do your damn research!

Eric Kolhede, Moraga

Dear Eric Kolhede: One of the weird highlights of this job is reading 3-in-the-morning e-mails from people who come back home drunk and write the craziest things. But your e-mail was written at 2 in the afternoon, so you can’t fool me. That’s pure satire. Still, you almost had me going.

Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has worked since 1985. He is the author of two books on pre-censorship Hollywood, "Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood" and "Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man." Both were books of the month on Turner Classic Movies and "Complicated Women" formed the basis of a TCM documentary in 2003, narrated by Jane Fonda. He has written introductions for a number of books, including Peter Cowie's "Joan Crawford: The Enduring Star" (2009). He was a panelist at the Berlin Film Festival and has served as a panelist for eight of the last ten years at the Venice Film Festival. His latest book, a study of women in French cinema, is "The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses."